The creators of Wednesday clearly love a good mystery, and perhaps that’s why they tried so hard to make a Miss Marple prequel series. Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, who previously explored a younger Superman story with Smallville, have found new success with the release of Wednesday on Netflix. The series follows Jenna Ortega as Wednesday Addams, exploring the mysteries of Nevermore Academy with a whodunnit element at the center of the story.
Before getting the Addams Family rights, Gough and Millar had another kind of mystery series in mind that they wanted to tackle. In a new interview with THR, the two reveal that a previous plan was to develop a prequel series about the Agatha Christie character Miss Marple, who has appeared in many various books, films, and TV shows. The series never came to fruition, though as Millar explains, the whodunnit aspect that intrigued them seems to have carried over into their Wednesday show.
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Jane Marple, aka Miss Marple, was created by legendary author Agatha Christie. She is depicted as an elderly woman who acts as a consulting detective, first appearing in print in 1927 and going on to be portrayed many times in different mediums. Angela Lansbury played Miss Marple in the 1980 film The Mirror Crack’d following Margaret Rutherford’s run in the role in a series of films in the 1960s.
The character has also been featured in her own TV shows, with Joan Hickson taking the role in the BBC’s Miss Marple series that ran from 1984 to 1992. Geraldine McEwan and Julia McKenzie would later share the role for ITV’s Agatha Christie’s Marple, another long running-series that began in 2004 and concluded in 2013.
Meanwhile, the story of Miss Marple continues on in literature. Earlier this year, Jane Marple returned in Marple: Twelve New Mysteries, a collection of short stories following the titular mystery solver. Perhaps the prequel TV show wasn’t meant to be, but Miss Marple lives on.
